Dems talk jobs as elections near

Democrats are priming the House floor for a manufacturing agenda they hope will bolster the economy, produce easy bipartisan votes and boost their chances in the midterm elections — at least if the polls they’re using are on target.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) teased the plan — sometimes dubbed “Making It in America” — after a White House meeting with President Barack Obama last week. The agenda appears to be the Democrats’ final pre-election push to clear the deck of jobs-related bills that have been sitting around for months.

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“We’re talking about jobs, jobs, jobs,” Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told POLITICO. “It’s good for the country — and for places that want to make things.”

The push comes after months of pleading from manufacturing-state Democrats, many of whom are on the ropes in districts hit hard by the deep economic slump. And it promises to give them legislation to highlight when they face voters angry about the nation’s 9.5 percent unemployment rate.

But the reality is that the bills either will have a limited impact or may stall before clearing the Senate.

Yet it’s common for the majority party to vote on “jobs” bills in the summer of an election year — even if they’re going nowhere. In the summer of 2004, House Republicans moved a series of bills they had previously passed in the same Congress in nearly identical form.

Democratic aides said they haven’t worked out the details of which bills will be included in the push or whether some of them will be combined into more complex legislation. But among the ideas are a $5 billion tax credit for alternative energy products and a mandate to study the state of American manufacturing every four years.

Democrats plan to present the agenda as a means of creating jobs, promoting green manufacturing through tax credits and grants and enhancing national security by rebuilding the domestic manufacturing sector at a time when many Americans are worried about China’s strength, according to aides.

Republicans said Democrats have hurt the economy and that this agenda is hardly the needed salve.

“The American people are asking, where are the jobs?” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). “These measures won’t erase the damage done by Washington Democrats’ job-killing agenda: the endless deficit spending, Obamacare, the national energy tax or their plan for the largest tax hike in history.”